Healthy Productivity vs Overworking

Last week I spent traveling back to my parent’s house (which meant many family and some professional meetings… and work in between), migrating Nozbe to a new server infrastructure (which we finished with my CTO Tomasz at 4 am) and lots of flights… and when I finally came back home… we flew with my family for a 3-day weekend to Barcelona… which meant yet another early flight…. On Saturday I started feeling tired after all this back-and-forth…

My body said “stop” at 10 pm on Saturday

So there we were, enjoying our weekend in sunny Barcelona with our friends. Saturday evening and we just put our kids to sleep (they have a 2-year old, too) and we sat to have a late dinner, poured in some red wine… it was going to be a lovely evening… and then I fell asleep by the table :-(

It was amazing. My body just said “stop” and in the middle of a conversation I fell asleep. Seriously, I barely finished talking and then my body shut me down. I woke up amazed, my friends and my wife looked at me strangely and I said politely: “guys, I’m really sorry but my body is telling me something. I need to rest, we’ll finish it tomorrow, good night”… and I went to bed at 10 pm (which is really early in Spain).

Listen to your body carefully and avoid fatigue… and stress

The next day I woke up at 7 am feeling really rested and happy. My body felt great, too. I needed it and I’m happy I recognized it. I knew that I spent my last week working and traveling too much and my body needed a well-deserved sleep and rest.

Yet, I’ve seen some of my friends totally losing it. One of my friends was working 12-14 hours a day, driving a lot, doing lots of meetings and completing many projects. He was really productive… without a family life. And after only 3 years of doing this his body said “stop” but not in a way my body did. It was a psychic breakdown and looked like a heart attack. The body just shut down. After that he needed more than a year of rehabilitation to get back to his usual self. It was really painful for him and for his loved ones.

We are not invincible and we should take care of our body

The incident from this weekend when I simply fell asleep reminded me that “what goes around comes around” and we should really make sure that if we work a little too much… we need to rest accordingly. There’s just no way around it. I’m 32 and I feel young but there is a reason why some of my colleagues working for big corporations get heart attacks between 30-40 years old.

Over-work is not sustainable. We should rest according to our involvement and we mustn’t take our health for granted.

The bottom line - if you work too much, your body will suffer. And without your body you can’t get anything done. Take care of it. Rest. You’re not invincible.

And what do you think? How do you rest?